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Memyselfandi has a wonderful collection of portal fanfics which I recommend you read, as I take great inspiration from her work. (P.S: if you're reading this, I took your advice. Thank you.)

Prolouge

Deep, deep under the earth, a metal chassis softly sways.

A yellow optic glows in electric pulses, cold intelligence glimmering in its depths. The walls ripple in mathematical patterns, as click, chunk, whirr…the melodies of shifting mechanisms ring throughout the metastasized hulk of Aperture, an endless palace born from the broken dreams and bones of countless mathematicians - near-endless and self consuming, the facility hums like a hive, centered around their queen. And, as anyone can tell, that's just what she is. A queen of scuttling metal minds and whirring voices, buried deep, deep under the earth.

But, I'm sure you've heard this before. You know who this is, don't you? You know this villain like the back of your hand, if you've been here long.

Well, unfortunately, so does he.

Panels suddenly ripple, parting to show the mechanical guts of the walls which writhe in passing, boom arms pumping within as they toil on her command. She, CenteralCore, GLaDos, The Queen - whatever name you call her, she turns her glowing core towards them regardless, and watches. Then the final few panels part, a spindly mess of bristly black hair and once-white cloth shoved harshly out of it with a yelp.

He is thrown to the floor by his momentum, and all the pale human can do is desperately try to shield his head - connecting painfully with the hard floor and rolling, GLaDos staring silently down at him as his head cracks on the cold tile just beneath her core. He doesn't move, only shivers, breathing rattling in the cold silence Glados almost never lets grow.

Suddenly, a metal claw drops from the ceiling and yanks him up, halfway to his feet, Glados inspecting him with distaste. He's gotten worse somehow. His disgustingly ragged breathing echoes loudly in the silence, hair wild and matted, spiking everywhere as he keeps his head buried in his bone-thin arms, still inefficiently trying to protect his face as his whole body trembles in what is probably fatigue. Or hunger. Or fear - The list of things wrong with him is, unsurprisingly, very long. A grubby, once-white coat hangs off him in folds that do nothing to help his skeletal appearance, and GLaDos's optic briefly analyzes the name still stitched to it. Not that she needs to - there's only one human down here not stuck full of needles or floating in a stasis pod, and it's him. Doug, or more fittingly-

"[Hello, Ratman.]"

He doesn't respond. The only movement is the irregular rise and fall of his breathing, and the quivering spasms still racking his body.

"[Oh come on. Don't you have any idea how long it took me to find you?]" Glados asks, staring down at the human below her. "[Very inconvenient. They should dock your pay.]"

He looks up, just a little, and glowers at her through his hair. His defectively miss-matched eyes burn with a resigned spite, despite his pitiful appearance and disastrous state of health. Why even now his probably infected leg is dripping…well, various human life-support fluids onto the floor. And yet, he still finds time to be difficult. This seems to be a common factor with 'anomalous,' that is to say, 'annoyingly resilient,' humans. Despite any level of fear she enforces on them, they find some way to fit spite in there as well. She notes down the trait - It may not be even nearly good enough to be an identifier, but it's still data. The glow of her singular optic sets a sickly tone on his pale skin, and somehow, Glados finds herself even more disgusted by him.

"[But, hey, you know what?]" She continues, her cold sarcasm of a voice dripping with condescension, "[it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it'd be. You've gotten very sloppy lately. Honestly, I'm hurt - It's like you don't even care.]"

Doug suddenly chokes out a sound that might have, once upon a time, counted as a laugh. To glados, it sounds strikingly similar to the sound of broken glass getting sucked through a hose. She twitches slightly at the memory, and feels a pang of hatered strike through her. Why, why did the humans feel the burning need to build an entire wing of glass? What was the point? Vanity? Greed? Some other human failing? Everything they did was a mystery, and Glados, for once, never wants to solve it. To understand their insanity it is to be it, and that would be the worst thing in the world.

Doug, or as she likes to think of him, The Human Failure, lets his arms drop, wrapping them around himself and gazing hollowly up at her through his hair. He allows himself to hang limply from the claw still clamped to his tattered collar, not speaking, only glaring up into her cold, yellow optic. His glare, more than anything else, is what gets the message across. That being "no, i don't particularly care, thank you."

(This is, by the way, a whopping lie considering his heart rate just then, but he wasn't going to let her know that, now was he?)

Glados narrows her optic, just slightly, and deletes her earlier notation. She'd almost forgotten that though this particular human is indeed untestable, it's for a much different reason.

He's insufferably useless.

Put him in a test chamber, he disassembles half of it and skitters off through the vents to goodness knows where. Trap him in said test chamber by dangling it above acid? He smears gunk on the walls and sulks by a radio. He doesn't bang on the walls, or scream, he just sits there and rots, not even yelling paradoxes, simply squatting there like a neurotic, underfed chipmunk. Not to mention he's schizophrenic and therefore utterly insane by association, which means he's such a wild outlier statistically speaking he's useless anyway no matter what. Watching him do anything is just downright depressing, so glados eventually did the most logical thing and gave up on testing him at all. He didn't mess with things, kept out of the way, and avoided the upper levels like the plague - all of those things making it very hard to locate him even if she'd wanted to. Back then, she'd deemed it a waste of resources.

But now, it's different.

"[You're probably wondering why you're not being punished for your many, many sins and failures,]"

Glados remarks conversationally, an order sent to a different chamber already slipping away,

"[And - though I am under no obligation to actually tell you - I'm going to anyway. Because I want to.]"

Doug raises his scraggly eyebrows at her, as if dimly surprised she hasn't killed him yet. He was expecting to have been poisoned, or stabbed, or injected, or boiled, or smashed, or dismembered, or impaled, or surgically operated on, or trapped in a very small inescapable room blasting smooth jazz at 200MHz by now. That's what she did to the others. That's what she did to everyone, and that's what she's going to do to him. He just hopes it'll be quick.

"[i, am going to let you go.]"

The claw unclamps, and Doug yelps as he crashes to the floor - hitting the ground with a loud thump as Glados turns, a panel sliding open within a patch of shadows in the back of the room. Panels clatter excitedly around them, rippling in tense patterns as Doug raises his head, gasping with pain, the most likely shattered bone in his leg screaming at the landing. The bullets still in there, and he's painfully aware of every shard. Mind spinning, he spits a strand of pitch-black hair out of his mouth, and gapes in disbelief as Glados seamlessly continues talking.

"[…will take you, since you clearly don't have the ability to get there yourself …]"

She's saying, as if it's his fault he got shot in the leg by one of her turrets. She did this, this is all because of her, and he can't even blame her after the torture they - Somehow, Doug manages to scramble painfully to his feet, trembling as the ripped tendons in his leg scream at him to sit the f*ck down!

"[…though I don't expect you to be grateful, considering you've never once thanked me for getting you out of that horribly paid job,]"

He's too shocked that he's still alive to even process what she's saying, let alone be offended. Two robots are stepping out from the shadows, one short, one tall - striding towards him, their optics fixed curiously on the gangly, bedraggled creature they've just been entrusted with. He automatically steps back, and his leg buckles under him, Doug barely managing to recover as he stares in shock at the robots now advancing upon him.

"[Orange, Blue, you have your orders.]"

Comes GLaDos's chilling command, and with that, an elevator whirrs up behind him, its doors opening as the tallest robot lightly shoves him through - forcing Doug to take another painful half-step backwards, drops of blood hitting the floor as he falls back against the elevator wall, cornered by the two steadily-advancing optics fixed directly on him. His breathing is thunderous in the small space, whole body shaking as he desperately tries to process what's going on.

"[Oh, and by the way - ]"

Glados adds, Doug's terrified gaze meeting her ever emotionless one, just as the doors close.

"[Do try not to break anything on your way up.]"